Barça must regain warrior spirit after Bayern raise bar

New signings and the return of injured players will not be enough for Barcelona if they want to dominate Europe again

IT ENDED not with a bang but with a whimper. Fifteen months ago Franz
Beckenbauer described Barcelona as “the best team on the planet, practically
perfect; and not just the best, but the most spectacular”. Not any more.
Bayern Munich, the team Beckenbauer once led on the field, thrashed
Barcelona 3-0 in Barcelona on Wednesday, rounding off a 7-0 aggregate
demolition in the semi-finals of the Champions League, in what a Catalan
football journalist described as “the blackest night” in the club’s recent
history.

In the previous four Champions Leagues, Barcelona had won two dazzlingly and
fallen in two semi-finals with honour, victims of football’s cruel fates.
This time there was no honour, no hard luck story. Just a rout. A headline
in La Vanguardia, the newspaper of the Catalan establishment, cried:
“Absolute impotence.” El Mundo Deportivo, Barcelona’s candidly partisan
sports daily, described the defeat as “the saddest epilogue imaginable